A PRELIMINARY STUDY ON THE STABILITY OF PARTICLE LADEN JETS THROUGH A FULLY COUPLED CFD-DEM SOLVER

Jets are widely used in engineering applications. In material machinery, hydro-transportation systems as well as in chemical industry it is
common to deal with a dispersed solid phase interacting with the jet, and therefore creating a so-called slurry-jet or particle-laden jet. The stability of a jet is a key issue for many of these processes, still the underlying physics of this turbulent multiphase flow is highly complicated. Conventional CFD approaches have been proven satisfying for the study of the stability of two-phase jets. When a solid dispersed phase is present in the system, the stability problem gets more complicated and dependent on the solid phase dynamic. A possible solution for the problem is to extend the CFD solver capability through a correct coupling with a DEM solver. In this work a preliminary investigation on the potentialities of this kind of approach is presented and compared with a pure CFD approach.
In particular the effect of the presence of differently sized particles in the jet is outlined and the influence of particle properties and concentration is investigated.
Finally some considerations about the computational cost of different methods are proposed. The fluid phases are solved through an Eulerian finite volume (FV) multiphase solver based on the OpenFoam® libraries, and coupled with the XDEM code in order to treat the
dispersed phase in a Lagrangian way.